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UNCLE SAM 



A Look Before and After 



DISSERTATION 




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By bequest of 

William Lukens Shoemaker 



UNCLE SAM 



THE REAL AND THE IDEAL 



A 
DISSERTATION 



BY THE AUTHOR OF 



"POEMS OF EXPANSION" 



WASHINGTON. D. C. 

1899 



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Gift 

W- Li. Shoemaker 
7 S '06 



UNCLE SAM -REAL AND LEGENDARY. 



Legendary ? Say, then, the ideal. For i t will, of course, be objected 
that Uncle Sain, as a personage, is not of legendary growth, as he is 
not the subject of any known legend, printed fable, oral tradition or 
romance. So much the worse, then, for romance! But may not 
this be owing to tlie fact that we Americans have had no '"Age of 
Fable," as we have no mythology, no material out of which the stuff 
of legend and of fable is woven by native story-tellers. The long 
twilight of the gods, in which such products are best grown and 
nourished, was not for us. America, or at least that portion of it 
called the domain of Uncle Sam, was born and launched in the full 
glare of modern civilization. How then could his posterity, the 
descendants of Uncle Sam, expect to tind here anything of legendary 
or fabulous growth, auytliing like, for instance, that to be found in 
the British Isles, in the enchanted circle of druidic superstition, or 
in the ''fairy rings" which, as readers know, occur so often in the 
pastures of Old Romance! Such things are impossible in any nook 
or corner of a land which is pervaded by the Society for the 
Diffusion of Useless Knowledge, and also loud with the strident 
speech of newspaperdom. Where ignorance is not allowed, 
legends, for the most part, do not live. But the myth-making 
faculty still survives among us, and it might sometime be said of a 
legend, as is said of that place reserved for the wicked, that if none 
existed, it would be necessary to invent one! Our poets and romancers 
must have something to work upon, if they are expected to weave 
not merely wonder tales for the "marveling boyhood" of men and 
nations, but to compose anything poetically true and consistent with 
the memories and traditions of our native land, that is, the ordinary 
stuff of poems and romances. And after all. this contention about 
' the formal matter — if any one is disposed to contend about it — has 
more of an air of verbal quibbling than of essential truth. The poet 
makes his appeal to a certain sentiment, and the sentiment must be 
anchored to a fact. It may be only a fact in the realm of imagination, 
as Prince Talleyrand observed of love, but it must be there, 
and be recognized as extant and existing, call it fact, fable, 
legend, or what not. So, whether legendary or not. Uncle Sam is a 



fact, as well as a factor in the worlcTs civilization to-day, and to l>e 
more important hei-eat'ter. He is also a fact to l»e reckoned with, as 
poor old Spain has lately discov'ered to her cost, and as the European 
States are not slow in finding out. And though not a prophet, nor 
the son of a prophet, there is one thing I will venture to predict. 
Having gone to war for ;in idea, on principle, call it a philanthropic 
idea, or even, if you will, a quixotic one. Uncle Sam will not admit, 
as certain of his sponsors seem willing and disposed to do. that the 
war entered upon for good cause was a righteous one, and that the 
consequences which the war entailed upon him are necessarily 
unrighteous. He will never face a proposition so absurd as that. 
He cannot do it, neither can he nor will be back down from a responsi- 
bility whicli he assumed before mankind and the world, without, in 
the world's estimation, losing prestige which he would not regain for 
a hundred years. And this, not a paltry question of dollars and cents, 
is to us, it appears, conclusive, as a main consideration. Not com- 
mercial supremacy and an open dt)or to the Orient, even, but, if not 
state necessity, the necessity of state, dignity and decorum, "and, as 
regards Uncle Sam, a becoming sense of what is due to his own 
character and position, in a word, the point of honor. Can he afford 
to abandon his allies, and turn these islands back to Spain and anarchy, 
to be tlirown, eventually, to the Powers in a raffle to be s^;amble^d 
for, and exploited foi- commerce and coaling stations? Even if he 
were willino- to forego the prize of war, and able to despise the gifts 
of Fortune, what would Uncle Sam gain by it? He would gain, for 
one thing, the character of a fool, a name to become reproach and a 
byword, and himself in time the laughing-stock of nations. 

But Uncle Sam is no fool, nor careless of honor and reputation. 
He has been successful in war and courtship, mainly because he has 
reo-ard for his honor and credit in the world and with foreign nations. 
And being prosperous, at large, he knows he cannot escape the 
" jettatura" of the evil eye, and the venomed tongue of slander. He 
has plenty of foes everywhere, but those of his own household are 
the meanest. To them he is indebted for a '• character" which is due 
to their misreading of American traits, and is the result, usually, of 
foreicrn tr-aining, or of native prejudice. There is always a '' squint"" 
which betrays the writter of foi-eign extraction in his dealings with 
Uncle Sam, who is made the victim, at last, of morbid sensibilities 
and bad dio-estion. of jaundiced eyes and evil imaginations. Their 



dyspeptic writing and characterizations are pathological, not psycho- 
loo-ical. This class is well represented in Mr. Kipling's poem of 
"The American," and in the editorial columns of a certain •' British 
newspaper published in New York." Uncle Sam. of course, is the 
object of the bitter hatred and jealousy of rival powers, and these 
men, mostly political eunuchs and '-shady" characters, attach them- 
selves to the foreign or reactionary party in all political contests and 
confusions. Latterly, in their combined ante-election assaults on the 
administration, and on Colonel Koosevelt in New York, they went 
so far as to defeat their own aims, to defeat themselves. 

But out of such contests come the noblest characters in time, come 
the best products of ti-iumphant democracy, and to the glQry of the great 
American People. They are good-natured, patient and long-suffering, 
they will stand a great deal, but they will not endure such assaults 
on character and motives, such contemptible flings at the conduct of 
an eminent and upright chief magistrate, of a gallant and successful 
soldier. The whole reptilian press, at home and abroad, has been 
engao-ed in this bad business for the last ten weeks — ^to what end or 
purpose? Its worst outpourings have been reproduced and echoed 
in foreign capitals, and given out in Paris, Perlin and Madrid, as the 
true expression of public opinion in the United States. We know 
what it all means, but they do not. They relish as much as we dis- 
taste these assaults on private character, on the honor of households, 
and on the riches of good name in men and women. And as we 
deplore the effects on national character and conduct, so we are justly 
indignant at this degradation of an ideal, and at all which reflects on 
Uncle Sam. For he is the typical American, he is a great "public 
character," and the hero of our national epopee — if we only had one! 
Indeed, we have one, not a long-winded epic, to be sure, but written 
in battle strophes and the building of a nation; in a great and happy 
family of free industrial commonwealths, a century's magnificent 
fruitage and performance. That ii, Uncle Sain his mark. Naturally, 
we dislike those who study to assail his character, and to sully his 
reputation, to belittle his achievements, to mortify and degrade him 
in the public eye and before the world, to caricature his person and 
performance, to scold and vituperate his public servants, to distort 
and misrepresent his aims and purposes, especially in his attitude to 
foreign powers, and above all, to attack him in the tenderest point, 
the point of honor of his country and the flag, which he represents 



6 

and upholds. To all such I commend the words — which cannot be 
too often recalled, nor too deeply pondered — of the greatest American 
of the century: 

'' Sir, I would forgive mistakes; I would pardon the want of infor- 
mation; I would pardon alniost anything where 1 saw true patriotism 
and sound American feelincr; but I cannot forgive the sacrifice of 
this feelincr to mere party. I cannot concur in sending abroad a pub- 
lic agent who has not conceptions so large and liberal, as to feel that 
in the presence of foreign courts, amidst the monarchies of Europe, 
he is to stand up for his country, and his whole country; that no jut 
nor tittle of her honor is to come to harm in his hands; that he is not 
to suffer others to reproach either his government or his country; 
and far less is he himself to reproach either; that he is to have no 
objects in his eye but American objects, and no heart in his bosom 
but an American heart; and that he is to forget himself, to forget 
party, to forget every sinister and narrow feeling, in his proud and 
lofty attachment to the Kepub.lic Mdiose commission he bears." 

(Daniel Webster, as quoted in Parton's Life of Jackson, vol. 3, 

p. 377.) 

But, of course. Uncle Sam has his faults and his foibles, though, 
as Franklin observed, " monstrously magnified in your microscopic 
newspapers." Then, he is a "character." and as such runs easily to 
caricature and comic exaggerations. He is the sport of "every man 
in his humor," and what American writer, what reporter even does 
not set up for a "humorist," and so have him at disadvantage? He 
will have his hack at him — (he would say, his whack at him). And 
the consequence — to Uncle Sam? He is a bundle of whims and 
oddities, I wish I could I say, oddities of genius, but they are for the 
most part the stupidest trash in the world. For instance, they make 
his person ridiculous. They dress him up as an antiquated beau, of 
the pattern of the regency — or earlier, our post-revolutionary epoch. 
Costumed in the Stars and Stripes, he has, always, the understrapt 
trowsers and spiked coat-tail, a tall white hat and a tufted chin, which 
with the straggled locks and hatchet face give him an "eldritch" 
look, and. of course, they represent him in all manner of absurd acts 
and attitudes, and engage him in the most quixotic enterprises. In 
short, an impossible character, a being of attributes which exclude 
one another, and hence a person acting from the most extraordinary 
motives and impulses. And see what absurdities, what contradictions! 
They make him out an owl in wisdom, and an ass in his demeanor. 



He is a Jove in council, a Janus in policy, and a jack-of-all trades by 
vocation. He is a northern manufacturer, a southern brigadier, a 
western granger, populist, free-silverite. democrat or republican. 
He is the village oracle and statesman, the corner grocery politician, 
the D-reat man at home, who dwindles as he approaches Washington. 
But even there he meets only his peers, and no superior, for he has 
no '"Superior" on earth! Why. he is himself a personage of the 
first rank and importance. He takes himself seriously, as he takes 
the festive cocktail in the land of his bii'th. Greatest country on 
earth, sir. He is a backwoodsman and a courtier. He comes to Con- 
gress from a western log-cabin, where he has lived all his days on 
corn bread and bacon, raw whiskey and tobacco. « Gradually, he 
acquires some of the vices of civilization. He gambles a little, he 
swears a great deal, he plays the races, or goes to a ball-game, he 
" chaws " tobacco still, and expectorates, he ''invites" a friend and 
takes his whiskey straight, but he goes to church regularly, he sup- 
ports the minister and the contribution-box. is a good family man 
and a good citizen, upholding the laws and yet a strict partizan, and 
a patriot all the time. Though a democrat or a populist, he votes 
without a murmur, fifty millions to be placed in the hands of his 
most determined political opponent, to be expended in a war that is 
certain to win prestige for a repul)lican administration, and almost as 
certain to ruin or demoralize his own party at the next election. And 
that is his answer to those who vilify Uncle Sam. his country and her 
institutions. Yes, our western friend has acquired some of the 
" vices of civilization," something of its polish, also, its false glitter 
and unrest. Contact with men and women has worn off his rough 
edges, has changed his appearance, sharpened his wits, improved his 
manners, and even altered his apparent stature and intellect. He 
acquires new dignities and honor, and with them new views and 
opinions. His manner changes, his moods vary. He is awful or 
affable, as he chooses. He can be stern as duty on the bench, and 
jovial as the genial host, the free-and-easy table companion. He can 
entertain the house with his oratory, and soubrettes at a wine-supper 
as well. He sets the table in a roar with his witty sallies. He is 
merry as a grig, and melancholy as a cloud in autumn. 

But he is only a type. There are more of him — and he is not 
Uncle Sam. The latter plays many roles in his time, and succeeds 
in all, or nearly all, that he undertakes. He is editor, lawyer, planter, 



politician, congressman, jndge, ambassador, senator or secretary of 
State, and president. lie climbs every round in the ladder of fame, 
and from the top one steps off to the skies (of N. P. Willis!) in going 
to his final rest. Rather. I should say. that like AVolsey he has 
sounded the seas of glorv. he has charted all the bays of suflFering. 
has exhausted the springs of enjoyment, has tempted every phase of 
fortune, and tried every round of human life and experience. And 
with what result? The old one — all vanity and vexation of spirit. 
He is weary and dissatisfied. From the top of human power, which, 
as Dante saw. is only green for a little while, he surveys the world 
of toil and toilers far below, tlie valley and the village where he was 
born, the fertile glebe, and the scenes of humble life from whence he 
rose, and he longs for the old homestead, the church, and the church- 
yard where his kindred rest. 

"And if my mother had uot lain there, 
All my grandeur had not been." 

(tO to Springfield and Lake Erie, go to Fredericksburg and Mount 
Vernon, and muse at the graves of Garfield and Lincoln, at the tomb 
of Washington and his mother, if you would know the best of Uncle 
Sam. Virtue dwells upon the heights, but in the world the ruling 
powers are not too virtuous. L^ncle Sam is in the woi-ld. and is hot to 
be caught napping- — by the cartoonist, oi' anybody. He is said to be 
astute and overreaching at a bargain, as in the case of the Phillipines, 
should he take them in. which is by no means certain.* But he may 
himself be taken in, should he discover, on taking, that he has caught 
a Tartar, or a Malay, after all! Don't be too tarnation smart. Uncle 
Sam. I know it is '' a terrible temptation." Spain has lost, and tliei'e 
are the islands just going as a prize to somebody. Shall he grab them 
or let them go? Shall he take (>ne or the whole boodle of them ? If he 
don't, who will get them i Let them go to the devil, say the antis. but 
how? Shall they be auctioned off to Germany. Russia, or Japan, or 
raffled for and parted among all three? But if any raffling is to be 
done, as it was I who shook the plum-tree (quotli Uncle Sam), show 
me, messieurs, a better claim than mine to the stake, or if that 
cannot be done, hold your peace forcA'ermore. The rij)eness of 
occasion may furnish no ground for robbintr my neighboi-. but still 
less is it a ground to you and others for robbing him. and me. too- — 

* Written before the eont-lusion of the treaty with Spain -which, by the way, is uot 

yet confirmed. 



him of his hite possessions, and rae of the fruits of victory. The 
case of Japan will not be repeated by the Powers towards us. Nor 
is that a case for arbitration, which the sword lias already arbiti'ated. 
The guns of Dewey at Manila ^-bellowing victory, bellowing doom," 
have spoken. Now, if Germany wants the islands, let her come and 
take them. Russia and Japan, ditto. For our part, we may. not 
want the islands "for keeps," and it will be enough, for the present, 
to sequester them from the FoM-ers, as a bone of contention to be 
\ fought over and snarled about. We do not want to see a o-eneral 

\ conflagaration, a European war as the consequence of our own. To 
\put out the smouldering brand is not only a neighborly act. it may be, 
/ or may become, an international dnty. The disposition ©f these islands 

i as a consequence of war, is a dnty devolved upon us alone, and a dnty 
that cannot be shirked. Uncle Sam will consult nol)ody as to the measure 
of his duty and responsibility. Honor forbids. l)ur he is not going 
to shut his eyes to the possibilities of the case. It is a maornificent 
opportunity. How magnificent, how great and far-reaching in results 
and consequences, perhaps no man living to-day knows. Uncle Sam 
does not know. But he '-calculates." And here is the key to the 
secret of his position — I might add, of his disposition. Placed in a 
critical situation of extreme danger and difficulty, and exposed now to 
the crossfire of friend and foe alike, can he extricate himself with 
honor, and come unscathed from the fire of this new trial? He has 
met every crisis with courage, has been equal to every emergency 
hitherto, and why not to this? If sufficient nnto the day is the evil, 
so is the power and the wisdom thereof. He may be, for a moment, 
in some trough of depression, in some valley of humiliation, but that 
he will rise again to the height of occasion, who can doubt? It is 
the way with him, he has always done so. He is accustomed to the 
doing of great things. He works on a large scale. No pent-np 
Utica contracts his powers. On the stage, the world is attracted to 
this unique and extraordinary parsonage. He is a great figure in 
affairs. He rather likes to dazzle and to shine, to awe and terrifj- 
and overwhelm. He is so used to doing the " impossible" that he is 
pleased at nothing better than the opportunity to succeed in spite of 
(predicted) failure, to snatch victory from tlie jaws of defeat, to escape 
from overwhelming ruin and imminent disaster. He has done it 
repeatedly in this war, and he will do it again. Out of this nettle, 
danger, he is going to pluck the flower, safety. It lies in his dispo- 



10 

sition. He is brave as Caesar, and as cautious as Fabius. He has 
valor — and discretion. He is not to be caught nappiiior. IJe sleeps 
with one eye unshut, his weather eye being always open. He is cool 
and determined — -"keep cool" — his favorite maxim. He has, too. 
the advantage of position. His resources are practically unlimited, 
and he commands them without stint. He has opinions and a will. 
He has the courage of his convictions. He has ideas. His " nerve " 
is wonderful, and his sang-froid never deserts him. Fortune, and 
reputation also, are on his side. Yes, Fortune has ever ''spanieled 
his heels." and followed him hitherto and so far on the road to great- / 
ness. Will she turn tail and desert him now? No! She is aftery 
success, she follows the great, she goes with such — personages like« 
Csesar — and Uncle Sam. They love dollars, but dominion more. \ 
They are covetous of honor and glory and dominion and riches, 
especially the riches of good name, for their country and posterity. 
They look for prosperity and a future bright with promise. So does 
Uncle Sam. He is fond of power and responsibility and big enter- 
prises. Pacific railroads, Nicaragua canals, and all that. Strange, 
that this habit and this disposition of his, towards a Marriage of the 
Seas, and for uniting the lands and peoples of earth, should make him 
less philanthropic, in fact, a Timon, a misanthrope, a cannibal. . He 
is accused (at home) of intended robbery and spoliation. He is the 
wolf devouring the lamb. And Spain is the lamb — poor old Spain! 
But Spain will survive the ordeal, and so will Uncle Sam. He was 
never known to be bloodthirsty. He has not the earth hunger of 
Greater Britain. Nor the Gallic thirst for theatricality and applause. 
Nor the sordid greed of the saurkrout German; nor the Russian vice 
of boundless extravagance and corruption; nor the low cunning of 
the Asiatic. These are not the vices of Uncle Sam. He has his 
failings and his foibles, doubtless. He has been known to " sell and 
mart his offices to undeservers." He has a civil service. Avhich, for 
its hunibuggery, is named and travestied the snivel service. The 
famous '-blanket order" is remembered yet in Washington. He is 
afflicted with Bryanism, Altgeldism, Tannerism. Quayism, Plattism. 
Crokerism, and "boss rule," generally. Likewise, free-silvei'ism. 
populism, fiatisra. greenbackism. and many others. He is profuse in 
public moneys and expenditures. Billion Dollar Congresses are the 
rule, rather than the exception. True, as Speaker Reed said, this is 
a billion-dollar country, but no matter, it is too much. The tie quid 



11 

]ilmis rule is much better. And there is the everlasting unbridled 
license, not liberty, of the press. 

Here the temptation is great, but 1 must not enter on a new 
chapter of woes, or rather a whole volume vast and voluminous 
of evil, of which the mere chapter headings, the bare mention alone 
is enough to excite the disgust, stupify the understanding, weary the 
patience, and stagger the credulity of readers. Let one sample of 
yellow journalism sufKce; look at its criticisms on the conduct of the 
war! Must we blame Uncle Sam for all this? Let us confine our- 
selves to his legitimate vices. These grew mainly out of his tempera- 
ment and situation. From the first he was a bundle of contradictions. 
He had oddities- enoug-h for a Sanclio Fanza. And whatever his 
failings or vices, he had a world to exploit them in. In his youth 
he was a gay deceiver. He sowed bi'oai least his wild oats, he left 
fiaming trails of debauchery and ruin. In half a dozen common- 
wealths he planted stay-laws and harvested repudiation. He sowed 
bad faith with the Indian, and reaped Indian wars in consequence. 
He enslaved the neg-ro, and afterward wrote his famous declaration 
wherein he asserted that all men are created equal. Consequence- 
rebellion and civil war. He was unjust in his dealings and unpunctual 
in his engacrements to friend and foe. He was unstable in his iudof- 
ments. fickle in his attachments, inconstant as a lover, and uncertain 
as a friend. John Bull despised him (it is not so now!) and even 
Finance, his old sweetheart, soured on him. He was wandering, 
restless and unhappy. He moved round with his household gods 
from place to place long before he married, settled down and went to 
housekeeping. Meanwhile, he coquetted with half a dozen maiden 
cities before he fixed on one — went to Washington, then a M'ilder- 
ness — and finally settled on the banks of the Potomac. Yes, to 
Washington, the Cinderella of cities, an ash-heap in summer, and 
a mud-hole in winter. This ward of Uncle Sam had longr to wait for 
her Prince Charming, who found -her sitting squalid and disconsolate 
on the cold hearthstone of her uncle, and presto! the little slip of a 
girl who has since played ••hunt and slipper" with the Prince of 
Wales and Alexander of Russia, became the best groomed and most 
beautiful of women; ay, the poor little thing, this '•huffed and cuffed 
and disrespectit " orphan lass of a city sprang up at once into a tall 
and comely maiden, the envy of all her sisters, the most charming of 
hostesses, the crown and glory of Uncle Sam, and the chief ornament 



12 

of his home. And the Prince Clianiiincr^ Boss Shepherd was his 
name 

It is needless to say tliat Sam is nuvv proud of his beautiful 
ward, and is also much attached to his niece, Miss Columbia, who, 
with her companion and housekeeper, constitute his immediate house- 
hold, and entertain lavishly in the official world, where Uncle Sam is 
at home. There he lives over again the days of his youth, and some- 
time entertains a guest or a table companion with tales of his "salad 
days," and of the innumerable escapades and adventures of which he 
is the hero, or subject. He may gloss over some things in his past, 
for no man who knows the world, and particularly no great man 
with his wide and varied experience in life and affairs, can afiPord to 
lay bare his heart, and to look, or to let others look, too narrowly at 
his failings and peccadillos. Of his hair-breadth escapes in love, 
and war, and diph^macy, and his many ''moving accidents by field 
and flood," his domestic treasons and foreign wars, as he himself 
speaks not, I pass them over here in silence. I only aim at his most 
salient characteristics, at his most essential traits, and 1 would not 
misread his character, which is both typical and American, if I can 
possibly help it. "It is my observation," said Lincoln, when com- 
plimented once for having no vices, "that men without vices iire, 
usually, not remarkable for any virtues either." Neutral cliaracters 
interest nobody. Strong traits, the individual lineaments of joy and 
sorrow and suffering;, the "exultations and agonies" which furrow 
the brow and engrave their deep lines in the human countenance, 
proclaim the man of mixed motives, of variable humors, and altered 
affections, vices and vii'tues in strange contrast and juxtaposition. 
JNo all-round man, no cluiracter like Uncle Sam, could ever be with- 
out them. The man of ''daring aims ii-regularly great " declares 
unmistakably his insuhir and English origiti. And I note this 
feature also in Uncle Sam, his tendency to excess, to exaggeration. 
Sam was always extravagant. lie spent money like water — and 
denied it a thousand times to his honest creditor, to the justly proud 
but pauper claimant, who held the documentary proofs, but had not 
the means to enforce payment. Again, courage is well, but reckless- 
ness? Sam can be utterly reckless — of life, honor, reputation, riches 
and renown. His "millions for defence, not a cent for ti-ibute," 
show that, on the money side. And in numerous personal encounters 
lie has shown himself equally reckless in his expenditure of blood and 



13 

wounds. He would throw life away as the merest bawbee. He 
sought the bubble reputation not only in the cannon's mouth, but on 
the duellist's ground, and on the deck of his gunboats. '" Don't give 
up the ship," cried Lawrence. ^' I have just begun to fiorht," said 
Paul Jones, in answer to a summons to surrender, when his masts 
were shot away, his craft sinking, and colors riddled but still flying. 
In peaceful times, and in rural if rough communities, Sam" lias 
developed homicidal tendencies, often in a marked and alarming 
degree. He has trampled ruthlessly on the inferior races. The negro 
had no rights which he was bound to respect. The only good Indian 
Avas a dead Indian. 

Which, in a manner, go to show that these savage traits are 
plainly a survival, that they are inherited from some far-ofi ancestor, 
and that in all likelihood in the far future Sam will hear "'ancestral 
voices prophesying war " — still war. Disarmament is out of the 
question. For John Bull, certainly, and for Uncle Sam, probably. 
They have many traits and ways in common. Their pursuits are 
mostly commercial, their dispositions in the main, peaceful, but 
recent history and experience teaches that war may come at any time, 
and they must be prepared for it. Let us recognize the fact and not 
ignore it. Academical essays and orations, Charles Sumner's for 
instance, on "The True Grandeur of Nations," do ignore it. The 
consummate vanity of this man led him to overlook, as it leads others 
lite him to overlook, and to imagine that they can set aside the facts 
of ethnology, and ignore tlie ways of Providence altogether. After 
ages of civilization, and after centuries of progress in learnincr, arts 
and letters, we are horrified to discover the ancient strata of these 
oldest and grossest of appetites and instincts, these rude barbarian 
vices and virilities cropping out from the forms of the conventional 
man, and under the veneer of social refinement and civilization. It 
can't be helped. It is there — to play the devil with your '"culture," 
and to remind you — ^you of the Ajiglo-Saxon race — of the rock out of 
which you were hewn. And better, I say a hundred-fold better, this 
rude strength, and this reservoir of reserved force, these excesses than 
those anemic conditions of a pale and etiolated student civilization, 
attended as it is by nervous prostration and paresis, due to dyspepsia 
and insomnia, to late suppers and all sorts of dissipation, as excessive 
reading and study and too much Atlienian culture. For these latter 
conditions, like the bulrushes of Nile, easily give way to the onward 



14 

sweep of tendency — to the cataract — and are blown away like chaff 
in the shock and whirlwind of war, while those other remain in place, 
like the bed-rock of the everlasting hills. 

If we were to seek the place and origin of these race traits in 
Uncle Satn. to seek, that is, the real foundations of his power and 
glory in the original basaltic rock-formations of his character, and 
especially if we were to seek for some lieroic and legendary character 
like him, we might have to go where we should naturally look for it, 
in the old Norse mythology and tales of imagination. For Sam is 
northern by nature and to the core of his being. In the north of 
Europe, and I should say to the far north, lies his ancestral home. 
There, the old family tree, symbolical oak or ash, curls itself softly 
to sleep against the northern twilight in the kirkyard of his forbears. 
There, in the dust, probably, of the old forgotten race of sea-kings, 
the bold Yiking race of hardy adventure and derring-do, with their 
strange drinking customs and Yule-tide feasts at the sign of the 
Boar's Head, with servants in the hall and a great fire of logs roaring 
in the wide fire-place, the oaken table spread as for many guests, the 
assembled warrior-husbands, fathers and sons with their wives and 
paramours, the sirloin roast and the gi-eat horn of plenty, the much 
drinking and laughter and song sprinkled with jest and allusion — 
none too modest in their toasts and addresses — to the fair "white 
devils " who drank of the same cup and shared the feast with them — 
what if Uncle Sam were thei-e? With that remarkable phiz and nil 
admirari manner of speech and action, and that hawk-eye of his, 
which the poet ascribed to CfBsar also, the grasping falcon eye which 
let nothing escape it, the drawling accent and intonation, the apt say- 
ino- and homely proverb, the dry humor and droll audacities of speech 
and action; the witty fund of anecdote and invention; the story-telling 
habit and faculty of telling your story in the guise of a fabulist 
(Abraham Lincoln had it); the art, also, of concealing yourself behind 
words while searching with the point of a jest, or an epigram, the 
heart of another's intention; the sudden mirthful run of some merry 
conceited thought on the level ground of understanding; or the dizzy 
altitudinous falcon flight of some towering aerial fantasy — succeeded, 
next instant, by the falling drop and plunge in the stygian pool of 
obscurantism — the pearl-diver's groping search for the lost word, and 
coming up with it to the daylight surface of common things, but 
with the all-over dripping melancholy and metaphysic of the Hamlet 



15 

of the north; and not wanting either, if not used, the powerful 
divining-rod of a really great and profound spirit of imagination. 
That sincrino- and sibylline quality of speech wliich is found in Dante 
alone among men of the latin i-ace, was not unusual among the 
Norse folk, and in the runes and sagas of the north; in the weird of 
the old bards and their wizard look into futurity; in the soul satisfy- 
ino- wonder of the world and the universe; and, above all, in the 
intuitions of God and the soul, of freedom and immorality, enjoyed 
by no other race to anything like the same extent as by ours. But, 
pray, what has all this to do with Uncle Sam? Nothing whatever in 
his political environment, his growth and branching out among the 
nations; everything almost in the secret sources of his power, and his 
life at the roots of being. For, if all this was, or was to be in the 
literature of the race, it was earlier in its life, and potentially at least, 
in Uncle Sam. Nay, actual and extant to a degree, if one look around 
these States, oi- go around them — encompass them in the orbital 
sweep of the Poet of Democracy — and approaching nearer, look at 
the situation to-day wnth the eyes of a poet — like Uncle Sam. Startle 
not, O reader, for Sam is a great inventor, and what is poetry but 
invention? The poet is a maker, not necessarily of rhymes, but of 
roads and bridges and things, and pray, who is the great road-and- 
bridge builder on the continent to-day? Who is the author of its 
agriculture, its manufactures, and its commerce, the triple pillar of 
industry supporting the edifice of the commonweal, and upholding to 
the world a model of our free institutions? There are forty-five of 
these commonweals, in ranged order and resting on a triple row of 
pillars forming the mighty and magniticent colonnade of expansion, 
which greets the eye of the architect and student of our political 
system. The Epic of Democracy, and where in the world is its rival, 
or its equal? Could haughty Greece or insolent Rome show anything 
better? The boast of Greece was its Parthenon, of Rome its Pantheon, 
and we have both in yonder Capjtol. We have all our penates, our 
household gods, enshrined beneath that stately dome surmounted by 
the statute of Freedom, as keeping watch and ward over them, all 
safely housed and folded beneath the wing of the tutelary goddess, 
the auspicious and benicrn Genius of our Countrv. 

Does it require genius of a high order, the art and faculty of 
invention, judgment, memory and imagination, to construct an epic 
poem, and none whatever to invent a political system ? Was Hainilton 



16 

less a poet than Joel Barlow, the author of "The Columbiad? Was 
there no music in his soul who invented those majestic rhythms con- 
tained in the balanced powers of the Constitution, and in the creation 
of those orchestral harmonies which establish the relation of the States 
to the United States, which compose our federal system? That orrery 
of our political heavens and earth, though not finished, was the best 
extant then, as now. As the Copernican system superseded the 
Ptolemaic, so did the American Commonwealth all previous democra- 
cies. It is the system of the one in many and of the many in one. 
E plurihus unum. And of such is Uncle Sam. He is not one 
character but many. He is many rolled into one. If Sam has been 
successful in politics and government, it is Itecause he sees clearly 
the path that he must follow. The popular aim expresses his con- 
viction, and he has no doubt of the fact. And if to-day Uncle Sam 
is an expansionist, it is for a still better reason. Imagination rules 
the world, and he knows it.- As a ruler, Sam relies much on the 
wonder-working power of that ••shaping faculty" with which he is 
highly gifted and endowed. As a wise man among the ignorant and 
superstitious, he makes use of signs and omens, of divination and of 
dreams. He goes not to the sibyl of Cumae, nor to the cave of Eo-eria, 
but to the source and spring of marvel in the human mind. " He 
inquires the way of destiny, and reads liis answer in the stars. To 
the fortune-telling peoples of the Orient he comes as the great western 
wizard with a full up-to-date equipment of scientific apparatus to 
dazzle and astonish them with marvels beyond even the Arabian 
Nights of their boyhood. To the East Indians he multiplies his 
" talking leaves."" He lays his submarine cables, and stretches his 
overland telegraph wires through the heart of Asia and the Flowery 
Kingdom, to murmur in the ears of those credulous children whatever 
suggestions or ideas he wishes to inculcate, or spread abroad. Oh, 
Sam is a wide-awake dreamer, a seer, a visionary, an idealist of the 
first water. A dreamer and a schemer like him. with empire on the 
brain, an inventor who is always inventing and wants room, ample 
room and verge enough for exploiting his ideas, his trade, his inven- 
tions, is bound to expand. 

Expansionist, indeed! and why not? — a full-blown expansionist 
(except in Boston and a few other localities), to-day. he could hardly 
be true to himself, his past or his future, otherwise. He is a 
politician — and a poet, lie is a maker and a mover — of machinery 



and ideas. He is a motor-power in the world to-day, and not a 
Keeley motor, either. He is a Babl)age calcnhiting machine. He 
lays down his premises, and by a series of deductive reasonings, clear 
and simple as a proposition in Euclid, without error or mistake, goes 
on to his far-traveled conclusion. A great nuithematician, a superb 
inventor, a marvelous poet in his way, and why not expansionist? 
If men are not such, it is because they are not poets and inventors? 
not astronomers royal, and mathematicians. They must be very ordinary 
people with ordinary eyes in their heads, walking abroad and seeing 
nothino-. Not so, Uncle Sam. He has the gift of fern seed, he walks 
invisible, seeing but unseen. His vision is not bounded by the horizon 
line of political conventions, by the make-shift and compromise of 
broken-down party hacks, their farrago of bosh and wretched expedi- 
encies. He makes use of these things and creatures, but goes far beyond 
them. He remembers his ancestry and his origin. Let us also remember 
it. He has a past behind him, as well as a future before hiin. In the 
past he speculated in land-values, in sugars and cotton, when cotton 
was king. To-day, he speculates in •' futures'' — and in the future of 
the country — because he believes in it. No discount on tliatr Dncle 
Sam! But returning now to the simple and elementary group of 
characters, the general principles and presuppositions involved in the 
underlyincr strata, wdiich compose the character of Uncle Sam, and it 
is seen how a few primary instincts, prepotent ideas and affections, 
a few simple rules, have shaped his course and governed his action. 
Altoo-ether one is struck, almost startled by seeing the observed fact, 
his bold individuality, his assertion of himself at all times and places 
wherever he has come in contact or in conflict with other races and 
peoples than his own. The stream of tendency in him of the Anglo- 
Saxon race is as marked and unmistakable as the course of the Gulf 
Stream in mid-ocean. Speaking generally, we may say for him and 
of him that he is what he is. He is nobody else but Uncle 
Sara. He is presumed to know what he is about, to know what he 
wants, his own intentions and how to compass them. He minds his 
own business. He follows his vocation, he rows with the wind and 
stream of destiny, progress generally, he follows Providence, and, as 
power is willing, he bends the oar and trims the sail to catch the 
prospering breeze, and he goes his way — where fortune smiles, and 
the fates beckon. He will arrive. His past warrants this belief and 
confidence in his future. But, as races culminate in individuals, we 



18 

shall find his type somewhere, in some strong character, some soaring 
and solitary peak of individuality, the primordial and primeval Uncle 
Sam. Where, and who is he? We left him, not lonn- ao-o, at tlie 
Yule-tide feast, sitting there among the boors and Yikings, and we 
may recur to that again, but now for the typical Norseman, or north- 
country man, who to this age and generation best represents him? 
Different answers will be given, as ditierent opinions prevail, but I 
will record my own. And I choose not the largest constructive 
intellect, Hamilton? Not the greatest achievement, Washington. 
Lincoln, or Grant, nor the all-round Franklin, not the vast under- 
standing of Webster, even, but, for my purpose, a more simple and 
elemental character, a man quite apart as a distinct, solitary and unique 
personality. I choose the poet-statesman and publicist, William 
CuUen Bryant. Yes, Bryant of the aquiline nose and hoary beard 
that " streamed like a meteor in the troubled air," with the northern 
sacras in his heart and conscience and imagination, northern to the 
core of his being, cold as an iceberg, but with the old berserker rage 
at heart — witness his fearful denunciations of slavery— with the head 
of a Hebrew prophet, and not wanting the weird and wizard look into 
futurity, a Bard and a Yiking of the latter age. 

And so we return to the Yule-tide feast, and the legendary Uncle 
Sam sitting there at the liead of the table, or near it. and equal to all 
the demands of the occasion. If he was there among the boors, the 
bards and the Yikino-s. then, at some time he must have embarked 
in one of their swift galleys to westward; perhaps, as the original of 
the "skeleton in armor;'' more probably amoi'.g those "twenty 
thousand Danish pirates who came over to England, and one fine 
mornincr founded the house of lords." For he had a restless and roving 
disposition; he had escapes and adventures, his dai'e-devildoms were 
many and proverbial. Yet it must be granted that his vices were 
allied to hio-h virtues and heroic aims. He had the heroic strain in 
his blood — that strain of honor and of greatness that runs through 
Koman story, through English history, and through American enter- 
. prise. At some stage of his career, as late, probably, as the sixteenth 
or seventeenth century, these racial traits, which derived -from his 
North-sea folk and kindred, were crossed in him by ofcliers of a different 
stock and a more or less tropic origin. The "land of the lingering 
snow" came down to the lands of the sun. and for a time reveled 
there. Tiie long-slumbering seeds of loose desires and giant appetites, 



19 

the o-reed of gold, the lust of power and dominion, of '• beauty and 
booty," burst suddenly into gorgeous and crimson bloom. It was a 
fatal cross, an awful transformation scene. But providential and 
necessary. The cold northern nature and sluggish vein of tempera- 
ment required this transfusion of hot blood from the southron, this 
dash and sparkle of the land of chivalry and romance, the vein of 
Guzman and of Alfarouche, and even of the old filibuster, the buc- 
caneers and pirates of the Spanish main. 

But we must repudiate for Uncle Sam the long list of Spanish 
cruelties and atrocities which, in the seventeenth century, made a 
hell of the Netherlands under the Duke of Alva, and of Cuba and 
Porto Rico under their capatains-general, from the immediate suc- 
cessors of Columbus down to Weyler and Blanco. 

William of Orange might not be a perfect character, but he was 
a vast improvement over the Duke of Medina-Sidonia. Sir John 
Hawkins was a t-lave-trader, Ralegh and Essex were adventurers, but, 
at least, they never coined the blood of the poor Indians into gold, 
as Las Casas relates of their Spanish prototypes in the West Indies. 

By what singular fatality has it come to pass that the very scene 
of these former cruelties became the theatre and the witness of the 
events of the Hispano-American war, and that with the disappearing 
fleets of Spain and her flag from this hemisphere, the long subject «»£. 
population of these islands, and the people dwelling on the Porto- 
Rican shore b'l'oke into a carnival of joy at sight of the coming Stars 
and Stripes — '• far off their coming shone " — and with shouts of 
" Yivan los Americanos!" hailed Uncle Sam as their deliverer from the 
devildoms of Spain! Blood will tell, they say, in the long run, and 
never has it told a plainer tale of the superior civilization of sweetness 
and light than in this crucial instance. And yet there are those who 
say that Uncle Sam had no right and no reason to expel the great 
Wild Boar who was ravaging these islands as ruthlessly as, at the 
period of the Normaii conquest, the great Wild Boar of Britain was 
ravaging that island, when all its native living and breathing flesh 
was being mown by the sword, when its horizon was everywhere red 
with conflagration, when wood and wold were scorched and blackened 
by fire, and its green fields everywhere soaked in the blood of its 
hapless inhabitants. But Uncle Sam is not of that opinion. And 
he has only pity in his heart for those poor, mad, blind and wretched 
folk at home, so maimed of intellect, and so perverse in their 



20 

affections, as to rail at Uncle Sam for his interference in the matter, 

and ev^en go so far as to pat upon the back the great beast of a Wild 

Boar, and tell him honestly to go about his business, while the new 

Ulysses — and Ulysses, yon know, was a great hunter of wild boai-s— 

is met and greeted by them only with hootings and revilings on his 

return from the chase that was wholly successful, and wholly in the 

interest of humanity and civilization. 

JOHN SAYARY. 

•Washington. D. C. 
Cleveland >^irk. 



